WordPress vs Blogger

Have you been thinking about what blogging platform is best for you? WordPress and Blogger are the two most common blogging sites used, and so I will be comparing them in this post. This will be an update to a comparison I posted back in February, except I will be comparing WordPress with a third party host against Blogger.

I am going to compare price, ease of use, flexibility and their mobile apps. Without further ado, here is my comparison of WordPress vs Blogger.

NOTE: This post may contain affiliate links.

Price

WordPress-WordPress, itself, is free. The cost comes with finding a hosting provider. While there are free hosts, those plans come with their own price. If you use the free hosting from WordPress.com, they will display ads on your site. You also won’t have as much flexibility. However, you can find multiple different hosting plans for fairly cheap. I love SiteGround, because they have cheap starter plans, and they offer amazing customer service. You can even get a free domain name with a hosting package.

Blogger-Blogger is a free platform, and you can blog with it completely free and with a subdomain or you can spend a few dollars for a domain name. As with free WordPress hosting plans, Blogger does come with a price. You cannot really do stuff with the back end of your site, like coding. Therefore, you can’t customize your site very much. It is also almost strictly a blogging platform, whereas you can build full websites with WordPress.

Also, if you have a Google account, you have a Blogger account. That makes it really easy to get started.

Ease of Use

WordPress-WordPress takes some time to learn. I won’t lie about that. Once I learned how the different features work, it became really easy. There are tons of tutorials on the internet that can help you learn how to use WordPress.

Blogger-Blogger is a great place to test out blogging. You can learn how to write and publish a post in no time at all. You can also easily customize your blog’s theme and other things.

Flexibility

WordPress-WordPress is the king of flexibility. There are dozens of themes for free and cheap that you can install on your website to make it your own. You can also install thousands of different plugins to take your blog to the next level. There are plugins for everything from creating backups of your site to tracking statistics to adding a web store.

Blogger-As a free program, Blogger doesn’t allow for much flexibility. You can’t do much customizing, but you can add your own themes. Themes can be downloaded off of different sites on the internet. Blogger does not allow you to add plugins, so you are stuck to what comes with the blog.

Mobile Apps

WordPress-The WordPress app allows you to do just about anything that you can do on a computer on the go. You can check stats, write and edit blog posts, respond to comments and you can work on the different pages for your website.

Blogger-The Blogger app is pretty simple. All you can do is write and edit blog posts. You can’t do any editing to your blog itself or checking stats or comment without using a mobile browser. This can be good if you don’t want to get distracted, but having to login to a browser can get redundant.

Overall

In the end, WordPress is great for long term blogging and website management. However, with the learning curve, it is not always the best choice for a first time blogger. Blogger is great for getting started and making sure that you actually like blogging without spending a ton of money.

If you are able to spend the time learning how to use WordPress, it is the best choice. Quite a few websites use WordPress, and it is the most common of all blogging platforms.

 

So, what blogging platform do you prefer? Let me know in the comments! Be sure to catch up with my previous post and follow me on Twitter (@HannahHaefele) so you don’t miss future posts!

Thanks for reading!